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Pleasure Uprising: Desire, Attachment, and the Sex You Actually Want
Formerly The Desire Gap Podcast
Most people who feel disconnected from their desire, their pleasure, or their partners have spent years assuming something is wrong with them. It isn't. The disconnection is real — but it traces back to what most of us were never taught: how to be in our bodies fully, how to connect to each other authentically, how to know and ask for what we need without guilt or shame. Culture shapes that — the broader culture we inherit, and the family we grew up in — and it can be unlearned. Pleasure, secure attachment, and authentic desire are your birthright.
You can learn what you were never taught — and unlearn what got in the way.
Dr. Laura Jurgens is a somatic sex and intimacy specialist, Master Certified Intimacy Coach, American Board of Sexology Certified Sex Educator, and former research professor whose work sits at the intersection of nervous system science, attachment theory, and genuine embodied pleasure. Every episode delivers the somatic, body-based tools that generic relationship advice and most therapists miss entirely — because desire, pleasure, and connection aren't fixed by talking more. They're fixed by giving your body and your nervous system reparative experiences and embodied practices that shift you out of your past.
This show covers: getting out of your head during sex · low libido and what actually helps · somatic and nervous system approaches to intimacy · desire discrepancy and mismatched libido · secure attachment and relationship repair · sexual shame and body disconnection · how to talk about sex without fighting · ADHD and desire · the orgasm gap and why it exists · reclaiming pleasure on your own terms.
Whether you've tried therapy, books, or just quietly wondering why intimacy feels harder than it should — this show will help you understand why those things don't move the needle — and what does.
New episodes weekly. Start wherever you are.
Free resource: Get Out of Your Head — A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide
Wheel of Erotic Emotions: https;//laurajurgens.com/wheel
For deeper analysis and the research behind desire, arousal, and attachment -- plus a chance to ask me questions, subscribe to my Substack: https://laurajurgens.substack.com/
Pleasure Uprising: Desire, Attachment, and the Sex You Actually Want
Break Free From Arbitrary Rules: Cleaning Out Your Should Closet
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This week we're diving into how "shoulds" sneak in and mess up our confidence, relationships, dating, and sex lives. Shoulds come from all kinds of places (society, religion, your grandma, that 2nd grade math teacher who said you had messy handwriting...whatever). They undermine us and our relationships, often subconsciously. Every time you let a "should" in, you're criticizing yourself or others and holding up standards you may not even believe in. Today I share a fun, easy tool to help you clean out your brain and free you up from these unhelpful, cognitive distortions.
Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide
More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/
Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/
About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/
Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel
Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited.
[00:00:20] Hey everyone, welcome to episode 32. So today we are doing a should inventory, an inventory of all the shoulds we have for ourselves and our partners. And this is actually going to be pretty short, but really sweet and super important to do periodically. I think it's not really a one and done, shoulds creep in on us all the time.
[00:00:49] So what's the problem with shoulds? We have a lot of them floating around in our brain, whether because we've decided once upon a time that this was a really important rule, or we have acquired some rules from society or from our parents or from religion or from people we know or at work or whatever, but they're basically internalized rules, and they are really unhelpful patterns of thinking.
[00:01:20] If you look up sort of shoulds, you can even just Google shoulds in psychology, and we see them as cognitive distortions. They're very, very not objectively true. There's really no shoulds for anyone, but they're often beliefs or expectations that we have sort of created this rigid thinking around, and they typically are, I mean, they really contain some sort of criticism, right, for ourselves or others.
[00:01:56] We should be doing x, y, or z, but we're not, right? Or they should be doing x, y, or z, or not be doing these other things, but they're not, or they're doing the wrong thing. Right? So they contain a critique. Essentially what they are, are rules. And a lot of times they're really unexamined rules. They're rules that we don't even necessarily consciously agree with or wouldn't choose for ourselves if we actually chose whether we have them, but we just sort of let them float around and operate in our life and make us feel miserable.
[00:02:33] Or sometimes make us act in ways that. Towards other people if we have shoulds for other people. 'cause I promise if you have shoulds for yourself, you have shoulds for other people too and vice versa. They can tend to really distance ourselves from other people because they are these little, little critiques, just little critiques flying around.
[00:02:54] And they're influencing how we speak and how we think and how we feel. And typically because they're. rules, and often pretty oppressive ones, they are not making us feel good. I have not ever met someone who had a should that made them feel better than not having that rule in the first place. Because we can always choose the coulds, right?
[00:03:18] We can always choose, well, I could, eat this piece of carrot cake or whatever, right? I should not is going to make us generally feel kind of bad and oftentimes want to rebel against that internally and eat the whole damn cake, right? So in the realm of relationships and sexuality and intimacy, it's really important to get a handle on, to inventory, our shoulds.
[00:03:44] What are the ones we have for ourselves, and how are those impacting us, and what are the ones we have for other people, our partners, and how are the, or people we're dating, or whatever, and how are those impacting both us and them. So, We want to be able to at least choose our rules on purpose, and I would offer, you know, if possible, releasing rules and choosing values instead is much more empowering and liberating and will just generally help you in your life uphold your values over some arbitrary rules that you are imposing on yourself or other people.
[00:04:21] So, some examples are, I should. Look younger. I should be fitter. I should want sex spontaneously with my partner. I should respond in a certain way to this person's touch. I should be hot for this person just because they're nice. Right? Oh, that's a really common one. I should not, and there's should nots too, right?
[00:04:52] They're the same thing. So. I should not masturbate this often. I should not look at porn. I should not need a vibrator to orgasm. These are all arbitrary rules that are not helping us. They're definitely not making us feel more free. They're really just internal versions of oppression, right? And a lot of times, they're not I mean, almost never are they actually true, right?
[00:05:23] They're just not true. So I want you to at least open your mind to the possibility that these things might be operating in your life in a way that is taking away some of your agency, some of your own empowerment, and some of your ability to choose for yourself what you really want, what kind of things you really want to impose on yourself.
[00:05:47] So the exercise I offer you for these is really important. And I do this, you know, every few months. I do a should inventory for myself because this, this, this should Little fuckers, they creep in, you know, they creep in from all aspects of society, from our subconscious, and we sometimes don't really know what we are shooting ourself about.
[00:06:11] And yes, I do use it as a, as a verb because when we do it, it's, it's like this type of internal oppression, right? Shooting on ourselves. So what I want you to think about is really examining. Are they really fundamentally true? That's the important question. And this exercise will help you do that. So what you're going to do is you're going to take a piece of paper and I really encourage you to actually do this when you have time and not just think about it.
[00:06:42] So take a line take a pencil or a pen and make a line vertically down your piece of paper and on the left hand side, make a list. Get all the stuff out of your head, make a list of all the shoulds that you give yourself about you or about other people. Right? Whether you agree with them intellectually or not, because a lot of times we don't consciously agree with them, but we're still giving themselves, giving them to ourselves all the time, right?
[00:07:12] So, make a list of all these things and if you don't you know, maybe a hundred percent agree, that's fine. Just write it down if it sort of pops into your brain or you, or you notice that you kind of hold that value. Don't try to think it, don't try to think about it too much and see what you actually believe, right, is true.
[00:07:32] But what are the shoulds that are floating around in your life? And there's a lot of them, so please challenge yourself to write at least one. 30. Yes, 30 shoulds for you and other people that you have floating around in your head. And some of them are going to be about your relationships, some of them are going to be about your body, some of them are going to be about your sexual response, or your not sexual, your lack of sexual response to certain things.
[00:07:59] Some of them are going to be about, you know, whatever, other people in your life and work and stuff. You can let some of those out too. And then, on the right side of the paper, I want you to write out the exact opposite. I want you to flip the script for each one of those 30 things. So remember your should list on the left is all the stuff that's just default in your brain, right?
[00:08:25] Shoulds and should nots. So then when you flip the script on the right, you're going to make them the exact opposite. So for example, if I have on my list, I should not have to use a vibrator to have an orgasm. Then on the right side of my list, I'm going to say, I'm going to write, I should need to use a vibrator to have an orgasm.
[00:08:51] And what I'm going to do with each time I write the opposite is I'm going to ask myself, Is it at least as true as my default should? Is there a way it could even be more true? than my default should. Okay, so if there's something that says, you know, I should be fitter in order to be attractive, I should not only want to date older women.
[00:09:19] Whatever it is, right? Right on the right side of the paper you're going to have, I should only want to date older women. Ask yourself, is it possible that that's at least as true? Or maybe even more true? And it might be more true because it's true for you. If that's your desire, Then why shouldn't you have it?
[00:09:39] So, you absolutely should have that desire, if that's your desire, right? So, by doing this contrast and seeing how the exact opposite could at least be equally, if not more, true, you're going to break your brain a little bit in a good way. And your brain is going to be like, wait a second. That first thing, that first should, is actually really not that true.
[00:10:04] If the exact opposite can be equally or more true, then your first should is clearly not not 100 percent true, right? And so what we're doing is we're actually giving our brain a chance to really expand and it will help it release the hold on these beliefs, these unwritten rules you have for yourself and for other people.
[00:10:29] You know, you might have one that's like, you can even have a little conditional statements, right? If my partner loved me, she would want to have sex every day, right? That's a should for your partner. And it's basically telling you that somehow her not wanting to have sex every day means that she doesn't love you, which is total bullshit.
[00:10:48] So you want to actually write out the opposite. If my partner loved me, she should not want to have sex every day. Is that at least as true? Yes, absolutely. Because they're completely unrelated. Her love for you and her sex drive are completely unrelated, right? So use this as a way to kind of open things up for yourself, because sometimes when we've told ourselves these shoulds so many billions of times, our brain literally cannot grasp the opposite potentially being true.
[00:11:20] So that's what you do. Do that exercise, do it pretty regularly if you want to help yourself kind of release some of the anxiety and the pressure and the criticisms that come from all these shoulds. And see if you can really challenge yourself to write out as many as possible. Go buck wild. It is actually a really fun exercise.
[00:11:42] It feels really liberating and great because you are just like cleaning out the should closet. So that's what we're going to do and have fun with this. Let me know if you get stuck or if you find anything amazing. I would love to hear from you. So you can email me and just tell me your amazing stories about how this broke your brain in a good way. I would be happy to hear that. And yeah, just have fun and I'll see you here next week.